Page 287 - Contribution To Phenomenology

280 JAMES G. HART

III. JReUgionswissenschqft and Phenomenological Theology

And this raises the question of what provides the experiential material
for "pure theology/*^^ for the true doctrine of God and study of religion.
And how are these to be related to facticity? Husserl makes this
proposal: If I want to judge the factual state of the world in ethical and
aesthetic contexts then I need acquaintance with the pure norms in order
to judge with a sober criticism the degree of approximation. The
implication seems to be that any source whatsoever, e.g., even fictional
Uterature, that is uplifting and edifying through its disclosure of core
values and ideals, that source may be regarded as the material basis for
"pure theology" or the essential study of religion because it enables the
intuition of core values.
This parallels his theory of "idealist art." For Husserl the artist can
assume the role of a seer and a prophet. All art is joy in the seen in
concreto, in its appearing as such, but it is not thereby "kallistic," i.e., it
is not thereby idealistic and normative. In such idealistic poetizing the
artist does not merely look upon facts and types of the empirical world
and regions of life; nor does he present ideals as typical facts or
empirical types. Rather the artist is normatively engaged with the struggle
of good and evil and he aspires to inflame the love of the good in our
souls without moralizing or preaching. He enables the typical values of
life to be transfigured through beauty and thereby raises the souls to the
divinity. The artist here takes on the role of the metaphysician in that he
raises the spectator to, and unites him with, the idea of the Good, the
Godhead, the deepest ground of the world, through the medium of the
beautifiil (Hua XXIII, 541-542).
In conjunction with this extension of the experiential basis of "pure
theology" to include other sources than the typical traditional sources of
revelation, Husserl makes a case for an enlargement of our appreciation
for the realm of intuition. And then he urges, echoing his letter to Otto,
that perhaps all attempts at articulating religious phenomena fail because
religious intuition presupposes the most universal intuition of absolute
phenomena or givens which transcendental phenomenology uncovers. And

^"^ I take "pure theology" here (Hua XXVII, 102) to be one which can grasp
the essential features of religious matters through eidetic analysis and purified of the
irrational contingencies of historical religions. See the discussion of the Dilthey
correspondence in n. 5.